🎉 This is the V2 of the tutorial, major changes happened since the 2016 release. Check the Change Log!

This is a straight-to-the-point guide to assembling a JavaScript stack. It requires some general programming knowledge, and JavaScript basics. It focuses on wiring tools together and giving you the simplest possible example for each tool. You can see this tutorial as a way to write your own boilerplate from scratch. Since the goal of this tutorial is to assemble various tools, I do not go into details about how these tools work individually. Refer to their documentation or find other tutorials if you want to acquire deeper knowledge in them.

JavaScript has a quite fascinating history. Brendan Eich created on his own the first language prototype in just ten days. Its implementation was highly influenced by the concepts of first-class functions from Scheme and prototypes from Self. Initially it was developed under the name Mocha, but released as LiveScript. The latter name didn’t last long either. Java was so hot back in 1995, that Netscape decided to take marketing move and rename their new language to JavaScript. This decision has greatly influenced the way JavaScript has been perceived for many years. Outward similarities to Java promoted imperative, object-oriented style among developers using it. Ideas borrowed from Scheme have always enabled using functional programming styles as well. However it was never the case until it started to get momentum a few month ago.